Oh, and Iran played a major role in evading the sanctions on Saddam. She made a lot of money off of it. Iran was happy to see Saddam being sanctioned, but equally happy to take a cut from the sanctions-evasion traffic through her territorial waters.

One of the key lessons from a career in Naval Intelligence is that if you can imagine it, someone is trying to do it. But we don’t need to “imagine” that Iran and her clients might be sneaking arms through the Mediterranean. Sneaking arms to one’s clients is S.O.P for terror- and insurrection-sponsoring states, and doing it via a maritime route is as old as man and the sea. Nothing is likelier.